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99designs / http-signatures-php

Sign and verify PSR-7 HTTP messages in PHP.
MIT License
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Avoid timing side channels in signature validation #28

Closed afk11 closed 7 years ago

afk11 commented 7 years ago

Use a blinded HMAC comparison to verify signatures, which avoids timing side-channel's through use of ===. See https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/11/preventing-timing-attacks-on-string-comparison-with-double-hmac-strategy for more details

This PR introduces a dependency on paragonie/random_compat, which adds a polyfill for random_bytes from PHP7. It doesn't affect PHP7+ installs, but is the recommended way to scramble for random data on older systems.

Happy to submit some backports if required.

rbone commented 7 years ago

Thanks for the PR @afk11. The approach you've taken looks sound.

I think in the future we should switch to using hash_equals but that'd require a major version bump since we currently specify PHP >= 5.5. Something to keep in mind for our next major version bump.

Will merge this in a moment and push out a new release.

joho commented 7 years ago

Might be worth a backport for a 2.0.5 release too. Don't think 1.x would be worth it.

afk11 commented 7 years ago

@rbone hash_equals is good, it would mean there is no shortcutting early if the contents differ (the side channel) and I had used it first before considering compatibility.

Using it in addition to hashing is probably fine, since hashing seems to have been proposed in case a compiler optimizes out such a check. It isn't strictly necessary since by making the comparison non-deterministic the side-channel information gleaned from the (===) comparison terminating early isn't useful anymore.

It's no harm having it, but with hashing the === operator seems OK and would be a tad quicker (almost guaranteed to fail at the first few bits, just different onces each time)